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Tech News and Commentary
Dave and the team discuss Waze and Cookie Monster, Spotify’s lyrics feature, toy catalogs for online toys, MIT’s mini cheetah robots, a WhatsApp security flaw, free rides for helmet wearers, Uber recording rides, and more.
Denise in Mississippi listens on SuperTalk Mississippi and asked: “I have a 6s iPhone and when I’m at my house I can not hear other people calling. In the city where there’s plenty of towers, it’s not a problem. Just at my house in the country. Is there a solution for that problem?”
Denise, that just sounds like you have a lousy signal at home. There are some ways around that but they are dependent on a couple of things.
The first solution would be a repeater like the weBoost and SureCall we regularly talk about. Those are installed in a way that allows them to pick up the good signal outside your home via more powerful antennas, and have an indoor module that repeats it inside your house. Unfortunately, that means that they need that signal outside and if you don’t have good signal when you stand right outside your house, they’re probably not an option for you.
You can also try WiFi calling, there’s nothing too complex about it, you turn it on in your phone’ settings then connect your phone to your home’s WiFi network and it routes the calls through the internet, only you don’t have to be aware of that. You can still answer and dial your phone as if it was using a tower, without ever having to think about whether or not it’s actually doing that.
The third option would be a combination of the two above, cellphone companies used to make available a sort of micro tower that would give service to the phones inside your house by routing the calls through the internet. The problem with this approach is that since phones themselves include that feature now, those devices are rare and rarely offered these days.
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